Brussels – The vote to be held tomorrow (Oct. 26) in Georgia for the renewal of Parliament has all the flavour of a rendezvous with History, the one with a capital H. Citizens will go to the polls in a climate of exasperated political tension and increasing repression of dissent by the authorities in Tbilisi, who are trying to keep the Caucasian country in Moscow’s sphere of influence against the desire of the majority of the population to get closer to the European Union. The ruling party, Georgian Dream, will do anything to maintain its grip on the state, which it has held for over a decade.
The forces at play
Tomorrow’s election appointment features two opposing camps. On one side is the ruling party, Georgian Dream, which expresses the current prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze. It was founded in 2012 by oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili in opposition to the then-ruling United National Movement (ENM). Since that year’s elections, Ivanishvili’s party has remained firmly in power and has progressively infiltrated state structures (as happened in the EU, in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary).
The party, meanwhile, has become increasingly transformed into a machine for maintaining the personal power of the oligarch (among the richest in the world), who effectively held the country in his grip for two decades. Over the course of this time, it has gradually shifted to increasingly pro-Russian positions, especially since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In the previous general election, Georgian Dream won 90 of the 150 seats in the single-chamber national parliament, where the majority is set at 76.
On the other hand, the opposition forces (the largest of which remains the ENM) have been unable to forge a broad electoral coalition, instead creating several alliances with a more circumscribed perimeter in the hope of more effectively intercepting the discontent of different population segments. The President of the Republic, the pro-European Salomé Zourabichvili, had launched last May an appeal to pro-EU democratic forces to sign a “Georgian Charter” in which to put in black and white their commitment to put the country back on the road to Brussels.
The pre-election climate
The election campaign was highly polarized. The ruling party deployed a particularly aggressive communication strategy, in which it juxtaposed some photographs of the devastation caused by the ongoing war in Ukraine with images of “peaceful” life in Georgia, alluding to the fact that a victory for pro-European forces would risk dragging the country into a military conflict with Moscow.
Georgian Dream’s campaign posters feature the national flag flanked by the twelve stars of the EU. The slogan is “Yes to the European Union, but with dignity.” However, for all observers, in the event of victory, membership in the European club (a goal inserted in the Constitution in 2018) will be pursued only nominally and, in all likelihood, will eventually end up in mothballs.
The political tension, meanwhile, has escalated out of all proportion. Oceanic protests by citizens (the vast majority of whom are in favour of joining the Union) have been going on in the capital, Tbilisi, for at least two years, with the peak of violence reached last summer after the final approval of the controversial “Law on Foreign Agents,” which forces all organizations that receive at least one-fifth of their funding from abroad to register as “agents of a foreign power.” Among other things, Georgian Dream has promised to ban all opposition parties if it wins the elections again.
Incidents of aggression and intimidation of opposition representatives and anti-government activists have also multiplied, as well as arbitrary arrests and raids on the private homes of journalists, researchers, and other independent voices in the country in a crackdown on dissent imposed by the government and carried out by the law enforcement and security apparatus. Fears for the integrity of the electoral process are thus growing, for the monitoring of which the European Commission has nevertheless announced that it has not sent observers, making do with those already present on the ground and the diplomatic delegations of the Union and the Member States.
An uncertain outcome
It is not easy to accurately predict tomorrow’s vote: polls vary widely depending on whether they are issued by entities close to the governmental area or the opposition. Most international observers seem to agree that the machine-party currently in power will once again emerge victorious from the polls. Still, the real question is how much of an advantage it will have over its opponents: the range goes from 30 to 60 per cent of support, depending on the different projections.
Probably Georgian Dream will not have sufficient numbers to govern on its own (let alone with the supermajority required to amend the Constitution). In that case, it could seek support from other smaller formations to retain power anyway, to be added to the seats it will gain from redistributing the votes of the lists that fail to pass the five per cent threshold. But all the other parties have pledged, at least theoretically, not to enter into post-election alliances with Ivanishvili’s party: if they keep their promise, a coalition government could, therefore, be within their grasp.
This coalition, however, would be so broad that it is likely to be unstable. Indeed, there are not a few doubts about the cohesion of a possible alliance of the oppositions, which, as mentioned, will not go to the polls in a united front, although they have agreed to leave it up to President Zourabichvili to nominate, if appropriate, a candidate to lead the government. The head of state, for his part, ventilated the possibility of opening EU accession negotiations as early as next summer should the opposition go to the government.
At any rate, one of the most significant risks could be that the defeated side—whichever it is—would refuse to concede victory to its opponents. For Georgian Dream, not retaining the government would mean losing control over state institutions and going through a season of purges, as happened in Poland after changing the guard between PiS and the coalition led by Donald Tusk. To avoid such an outcome, it cannot be ruled out that Ivanishvili’s party would attempt a coup, with all the unpredictable consequences. Conversely, even a defeat of the opposition would exacerbate social tensions, throwing the country into even worse chaos than seen so far.
The battle between Russia and the West
After all, a divided Georgia is exactly what suits Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has centred his foreign policy strategy on the fragmentation of the so-called post-Soviet space and the estrangement of its member countries (mainly Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Ukraine) from the West, i.e., the EU and NATO. Moscow’s troops are present in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two self-proclaimed independent republics from Tbilisi following the dissolution of the USSR, and they have never left since the 2008 invasion.
On the other hand, Georgia applied to join the EU in March 2022 and received candidate status last December. But since then, its path has been de facto frozen. Brussels didn’t like the laws passed by the Georgian Parliament in the past year and a half—the very ones that triggered the most participated popular protests in thirty years—and the gradual deterioration of the rule of law, so much so that EU funding to Tbilisi has been suspended.
In this climate and context, Europe fears Russian interference and its attempts to influence the vote and its outcome. There are fears in Brussels that the promise of entry into Europe to Tbilisi is no longer so attractive compared to what Moscow, which has interests in the country other than economic, could put on the table or promise.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
